


patron saint of lost causes

by NekoAisu



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Gen, Haircuts, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Male-Female Friendship, Self-Esteem Issues, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-29
Updated: 2019-03-29
Packaged: 2019-12-26 01:32:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,931
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18273068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NekoAisu/pseuds/NekoAisu
Summary: He feels like it’s the closest thing to home he’ll ever be able to find─that of the comfort Melianthus wraps him in without question, patient and careful with all his sharp edges and barely mended breaks─and tries to forget about how undeserving he is of her care.





	patron saint of lost causes

**Author's Note:**

> heed the tags!!! let me know if there's anything else i need tag if it's been missed please!!

Z’ahir isn’t sure when he lost the ability to feel easy happiness. When he thinks back on the past few years, it’s all a haze. Some events stick out—the Bloody Banquet, Fahmi’s sixth death, the way Aymeric had found peace enough to smile in the wake of the Heavens Ward debacle—but nearly all of them are instances of terror, grief, and/or the very near death of his loved one(s).

Gods, even acknowledging that he has a makeshift family now feels… strange. Otherworldly. 

He stares at himself in the warped mirror of his inn room and wonders how in the hell they put up with him.

He can’t see the Zahir they describe. There’s nothing dependable about how he skips out on being honest as if avoiding the plague, nothing entertaining about his penchant for picking up people as he does baubles (shiny, beautiful, brand new) before tossing them away and leaving before morning, and nothing beautiful about how he looks one gust of wind away from eating cobblestone.

When he looks at himself, it’s an evaluation. It’s as if regarding a stranger: silent and judgemental in his appraisal. He tilts his head back and watches as his eyes disappear from the reflection. If it can’t stare back at him, it can’t  _ be  _ him. 

He tugs his shirt off.

Many would give their all to look like a diecast copy of Fahmi—elegant without effort same as their vaunted Warrior of Light—but it feels strange every time he’s mistaken for this brother in all his world-saving glory. They may be the same height, have nearly the same build when clothed, and have matching habits of tossing aside their self preservation instincts in pursuit of a brighter tomorrow, but they’re still  _ individuals. _ Zahir stares at the fall of his hair over his shoulders. In the dim light of his temporary room, it’s a shade not unlike tarnished copper. If it had been black, it would be just another nail in the coffin that is his eternal inferiority.

He tugs at it, despondent, and fumbles for the worn clipfoot knife sitting on the vanity. He’s different (not in any good way, but different nonetheless). He doesn’t need to keep the braids and carefully twisted hairstyles that are Fahmi’s handiwork. He thumbs the blade with half a smile before lifting it to his hair. 

The first section feels not unlike sawing through nerves. He’s tense, terrified against all odds that someone may see him ( _ stop _ him), but once the barely-one-ilm-thick piece is cut… he can’t stop.

Each uneven chunk that follows fills him with euphoria. He sweeps the untouched sections forward to saw through them just as messily as he’d done the sides. 

Fahmi would never do something like this. He’s perfect, well kept in mind and body, and his hesitancy to speak is endearing where Zahir’s steady command of the common tongue is somehow treated as a nuisance. ( _ It’s because you won’t shut up,  _ his brain likes to remind,  _ you should just forget about talking. _ )

Fahmi would never do a thing to his perfect, straight hair─just as he’d never harm Zahir knowingly (but that doesn’t stop his existence from casting all else in shadow)─because he’s no need to. He’s gifted, has been since before they met, and it shows in his illworn confidence. He’s confessed multiple times prior that he feels that he’s never truly  _ earned  _ the right to be  himself comfortable. Z’ahir finds the concept of Fahmi being undeserving laughable (but he never laughs at him, instead opting to murmur sweet nothings in a flood where he knows there should be logic to stop his brother’s fiendish mind).

When they’d started adventuring, it’d been barely a year since Fahmi’s near-drowning. He’d been collecting memories like some collect scars: haphazardly and with a permanent ache that likes to bury into his bones and make a home of them. Zahir hadn’t known what to do about it. About  _ him. _ So he left Fahmi to it until he broke and then pieced him back together.

Again.

And again.

And  _ again _ .

Looking at him now, it’s of no speculation what it is Fahmi has gained that warrants jealousy. Irrationally, Zahir wishes he’d stayed a curious wraith of a man (too thin, too empty, too earnest).

Those days, everything was simpler.  Those days, neither of them would wake up screaming.

Nowadays, he’s reminded of exactly how obsolete his company has become. 

He feels stupid  childish, ridiculous, guilty in how fixated he is on being like someone else.  _ Becoming _ someone else. Fahmi is a hero, Eorzea’s vaunted Warrior of Light, and Zahir cannot hope to compare. He isn’t supposed to  _ want  _ to. 

Fahmi forgets to sleep, to eat, to stop staring out into the distance as if communing with those on the other side of the veil will give him a measure of respite from his inescapable terrors. He stops speaking in the middle of a word just to go back, to retrace where he’d been going as if lost, and continue. Haltingly. Slowly. 

Painstakingly vigilant to his last.

Zahir knows he should never want to be so haunted, to have his heart and soul hollowed out so effectually, but there’s always a part of his mind that screams for the pain of it.  

(Maybe, if he’s empty enough, that hole within his ribs could fit  someone something else that’s better.)

He tries to project confidence, keeps up with the times near obsessively (even if it’s just some minor resurgence of vintage Ul’Dahn silks being used as hip sashes), and tries his best to appear attractively demure. It’s when he’s sitting in some decently kept pub, legs crossed and armor set aside in favor of things the High Houses of Ishgard would balk at, that he can ignore how terribly  _ ugly  _ he feels. He likes the looks, lives for the casual touches and their accompanying invitations, and could drown in the pleasure that almost always follows. 

He’s no mythic hero, yes, but he’s lithe and enthusiastic enough to bed some decently attractive, nameless sod on the regular. It’s the women who tell him how good he is, how handsome, and like to watch him come apart at the feel of their heat. It’s the men who compliment the sinuous curves of his well-earned muscle same as they like to remind him how  _ small  _ he is within their grip (tiny, in all honesty, when compared to a fully grown Highlander or even a teenage Elezen). He loves it, thrives off it, and doesn’t mind the cold that is sneaking out of their bed and back to wherever it was he had promised to be sleeping.

The mirror reminds him to be more careful. There’s a collection of long-bloomed bruises along the side of his neck that he’d forgotten colored the pale curve of it, fresher and far more sore bite marks along the back from a spirited Xaela huntress whose understanding of delicacy was riding him until he swore he could see Mother Hydaelyn herself welcoming him back to her fold, and some residual soreness to his thighs after a quick tussle with another Miqo’te in a back alley before they’d left port for inland adventures. He wants to peel the marks off same as he wants to tattoo them on─to keep for eternity as a reminder that he’s good enough for one thing, at the least─but they fade within a week and he finds others to put more on him. 

Fahmi gives him a despairing look every time he spots evidence of another one night stand as if to say,  _ “Are you alright? Can I soothe you in any way?”  _ He’s too kind, always has been, and Zahir hates him for it. 

Zahir has never been a first place child. Not like Fahmi, or his dragon-slaying lover. Not like the daring Ser Aymeric and the fearsomely indomitable Lucia. Not like his own father, or mother. 

He’s just Ahir of the Z tribe who threw away his true name in pursuit of an easier path to a meal.

It’s always been like that (him being just _okay_ , mediocre, passable) and it grates at his nerves same as it has for nearly all of the last decade. Twenty seven years into looking for a place he can call _indisputably_ his and still no dice. 

He sighs, gaze drawn to the pile of hair at his feet, the strands stuck to his hands and shoulders, and looks into the mirror again. With the remaining locks brushing his nose when he leans forward, he feels so much lighter. 

He feels so much  _ worse.  _

There’s a knock at his door, the warped wood rattling on its hinges at the force, and he winces. “Yes? Does someone have need of me?”

The voice that filters through the barrier is soothing in its tenor, Melianthus making herself known in a call of, “No, but I have a feeling you’ve need of me instead.”

He puts the knife down and shivers in the sudden draft that follows his surrendering of the weapon. The cold from the stone beneath his feets seeps into his bones. He walks toward the door slower than a knight trudging through a Coerthan blizzard. 

When he opens it, she smiles at him like his unspoken permission to come in is a gift unto itself. Zahir smiles (empty) and walks back into his room to pull his shirt back on. She doesn’t mention his hair, or the ancient knife sitting precariously close to the edge of the vanity’s worn wooden countertop. 

Instead, she holds out her arms and asks, “You okay with a hug? I could use one, after the week we’ve had.”

When he folds himself into her embrace, her touch burns brand-hot against his skin. She runs a hand through his choppy, ridiculous hair almost absentmindedly and pulls back to snatch the musty comforter from his bed. Wrapped in her warmth, caged in by her arms and unerring affections, the blanket is nearly overkill. 

But it’s beautiful even when he begins to cry _.  _ Melianthus holds him through it, never pushing and always giving in a fantastic balancing act Zahir knows he and Fahmi both struggle with. She never asks him or any other members of their party to work for that which spills from her heart as if overflowing. Never refuses their own forms of reciprocation whenever they’re ready to give back. 

He feels like it’s the closest thing to home he’ll ever be able to find─that of the comfort Melianthus wraps him in without question, patient and careful with all his sharp edges and barely mended breaks─and cries himself to sleep. 

Melianthus does not leave him, but instead kicks her boots off and lays them both in the narrow space of the rickety twin bed. She smoothes a hand along his forehead, brushing his hair back and sighing at the creasing he’d started to gather betwixt his eyebrows. “You’re too good to us,” she laments. “If only you could see how loved you are. How kind. How irreplaceable.” She laughs, the sound a rumble in her chest, and settles down in full. “Listen to me, talking to the air as if it’ll solve all our problems. Goodnight, Z’ahir. May the Fury see that you rest well.”

 

(They wake late to the sound of Fahmi tripping over his new robes and knocking his head on the wall. Warrior of Light, his arse. If being a legendary hero didn’t somehow preclude him from making a fool of himself, the title was useless.)

**Author's Note:**

> comments, kudos, and concrit are all greatly encouraged and appreciated!
> 
> hmu on:  
> tunglr | kiriami-sama  
> twitter | FlamingAceKiri  
> discord | NekoAisu#7099


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